Highly recommended newsletter: DeSmogBlog

[Editor: I subscribe to a newsletter that I highly recommend, DESMOG. Below is information about DeSmogBlog, followed by a sampler showing contents of their most recent newsletter. Subscribe here. – RS]

The DeSmogBlog Project began in January 2006 and quickly became the world’s number one source for accurate, fact based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns.

TIME Magazine named DeSmogBlog in its “25 Best Blogs of 2011” list. Our articles and stories are routinely highlighted in the world’s most popular news outlets and blogs: New York Times DotEarth, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, and Treehugger, to name a few….

Newsletter, Sept. 21, 2017:

President Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has, as a corporate attorney, personally represented a host of energy and utility companies, many of which do business that is directly impacted by FERC’s decisionmaking. According to Kevin McIntyre’s financial disclosure — obtained by DeSmog and published here for the first time — these include major utilities, fracking companies, pipeline builders, and international energy corporations.

McIntyre is a lawyer who co-leads the global energy practice for the legal and lobbying firm Jones Day, and is currently awaiting final Senate confirmation of his appointment to the nation’s top energy regulatory body. That confirmation may come as soon as this week. Read more.

Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was “deeply important” and a “feat of American intellectual and political history,” said a review in Publishers Weekly.

The New York Times said the book joined an emerging corpus of important work of scholars and journalists that was “documenting the systematic, organized effort to undermine democracy and change the rules.” Read more.

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to protect its bases and operations from rising seas and other impacts of climate change, despite an order by President Trump to halt climate planning.

On March 28th, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order that rescinded all climate change actions within federal agencies. These actions had been mandated by a rule from the former Obama administration that required federal agencies to take the necessary steps to protect their respective agencies from climate threats. The original Obama order required military bases to factor climate change into their planning operations for expansions, existing structures, and future developments. Read more.

A contractor hired by the state of Michigan to independently review an aging oil pipeline running under the Great Lakes was simultaneously working for the pipeline company, documents obtained by DeSmog suggest. The documents contradict the contractor’s earlier claim that it had effectively stopped working for Enbridge once hired by Michigan.

Last year, facing increasing public pressure to shut down Enbridge’s 64-year old pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac between Lakes Michigan and Huron, Governor Rick Snyder convened Michigan’s Pipeline Safety Advisory Board. One of the Board’s first actions was to order studies about the pipeline, called Line 5, and the Board soon hired Calgary-based Dynamic Risk Assessment Systems Ltd. (Dynamic Risk) to provide an alternatives report. Read more.